Nothing to see here.

So it’s been over a year since I’ve been on the blog, but hey– whatever.

I saw something last night that didn’t just set dominoes falling in my head, it rage-flipped the table and hit me with a chair. Concussive realization aside, it all comes down to one thing: World War Fucking Three.

…and then it all went dark.

Yes, this sounds a bit tinfoil hat at first, but stay with me. A couple weeks ago, I stumbled across an article online that floored me. Giovanni Gambino, yes one of those Gambinos, told NBC that “the rise of global terrorism gives the Mafia a chance to show its good side. … We make sure our friends and families are protected from extremists and terrorists, especially … the Islamic State.”

Well, historically speaking, the Mafia was supposed to protect their own from the abuses of others– among other things. Hearing the son of the Teflon Don making a bold comment like that on a mainstream media source gave me a huge grin. Yes, every last one of my great grandparents came from Italy, and no— I actually have no clue how to get in with La Cosa Nostra. I know, I’m disappointed too.

Looking at it from the outside, a famously criminal organization is better suited to tackling another such organization. Naturally, thanks to my heritage, I grinned and drank my wine thinking about how profound his commentary was. Guy’s smart, and his points were valid. There are certain kinds of things that no amount of surveillance can unearth. You need to know how to look, and know people who know people.

Makes sense, right?

Yesterday, I came across a series of articles where El Chapo (the head of the notorious Sinaloa Cartel) had some choice words for Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi– and although they ended up being false… well here’s the thing: pit a ruthless cartel that gives fewer fucks about collateral damage than China (a nation ISIS has also managed to piss off) against a ragtag group of fanatical assholes… and well… I’m not the only one who would be positively throbbing to watch it go down.

Why? Because fuck yeah, these guys play by the same lack of rules– which boil down to one premise.

— and everything you hold dear. Really anything around your general vicinity.

That kind of no-Geneva Conventions firefight would be precisely what it would take to eradicate ISIS. Right? Right?

That’s when it dawned on me. This is how World War 3 kicks off.

Think about it this way.

ISIS has pissed off pretty much all of Western civilization (I’m including Russia in this lump sum).

ISIS has also pissed off China. Big Red doesn’t come into this equation just yet.

ISIS has pissed off La Cosa Nostra. The days of Capone may be long gone, but if you think the Mafia is out of cement overshoes– you’re just dumb.

If ISIS fucks with the Sinaloa Cartel’s operations, or even has the ability to compete, I’m pretty sure El Chapo will react as the now-debunked reports depicted.

ISIS lacks popular/global Muslim support because fuck those guys, they don’t speak for Islam. They look at those Daeshbags the same way Christians look at the Westboro Baptist Church. (Yes, I realize WBC doesn’t kill people, but they’re still sanctimonious fuckpiles of shit stew that would have served the world better as a stain on their parents’ mattress.) In fact, ISIS kills more Muslims than anybody else. Then again, considering their “home turf,” this should pose no surprise.

Now you’re saying, “Yeah, we get it, fuck those guys in particular. What’s the point?”

With the exception of Big Red, class, what religion is generally associated with the aforementioned nations/organizations? If you said Christianity, you’ve just found the lynch pin I was going for. Let’s say Daesh does piss off El Chapo… and the Sinaloa Cartel decides to hatefuck them with a steel pineapple. The day Santa Muerte starts soaking sand with blood, the terrorists will make it out to be a Christian vs Muslim thing.

Ponder this for a few hours.

The common attitude towards this particular cadre of assjacks is pretty well known. Let’s play a probable hypothetical situation here. If a cartel decides to take a plane full of whoop ass overseas, it will take a token bribe at best to have law enforcement look the other way. Why? Because everyone is saying, “Fuck those guys in particular.” See a pattern yet? Good.

These guys have fewer fucks to give about a little thing called “collateral damage” than Big Red. You get a war party of contract killers together, and now send them on a no-holds-barred fragfest somewhere far from home. How many are going to know how to speak any of the languages over there? If you answered “probably none,” you already see where this is going. They’re not going to try and root out those Daeshbags with any sort of delicacy. Nope. They’re going to fight every bit as dirty as those Daeshbags– which is appallingly thrilling on a visceral level. Because fuck those guys right? Except this kind of insurrection is exactly what they want.

Those bastards are going to call it another fucking crusade… and they’re going to call for a plausible jihad that many otherwise-peaceful people will blindly follow. Think about how many players are in town right now. Big Red and Russia have oil interests, with Russia spanking the shit out of both rebels and Daeshbags. Oh wait, Turkey just shot down a Russian jet, and apparently they’re on the same side as us– whatever the fuck that is. Pretty much anyone with a bomber is hammering Syria with anything they can get their hands on. It’s already a fucking war zone, and everyone’s already scared, pissed off, or both.

All of the rules of engagement would go sideways at that point, because when you live in a shitty, bombed-out country… your life flat out sucks in ways neither you or I can comprehend. Suddenly assholes from across the Atlantic show up, and prove that those crazy “fundamentalist” assholes that were killing your neighbors were right all along. Boom. You have a front that will rapidly rise, and will see both the whoop-ass squad and the foreign militaries in the same light: as crusaders. You have to protect your own, right?

This is how war starts. I’m not talking the kind of war that has been fought over the past 70 years. That’s timid compared to what would happen… battlefields on a scale not seen since WW2. Not to mention, a totality not seen since… oh… the last of The Crusades. By the way, the F-35 can’t dogfight or much of anything else.

Tell me I’m wrong. No, seriously, with the cards already on the table– and knowing what complete assholes people generally are these days… It doesn’t take very much of a stretch of imagination to see how this could all get much, much uglier.

Right now, I am glad that I’m too old to draft… the The Force Awakens in less than a week. Time’s on my side for this one…

This little corner of paradise was carved out, left handed, out of the madness of infirmity. Rather, I was drugged up, bored, and gimped by wrist surgery. Back then, this place was great. People read and commented, and it shed some comedy on an otherwise screwy situation. Some of you know the whole story. The rest should go back to the first entry and rehash some of the better entries. Even when I devolved into rants, drunk stories, an other fuckery– there’s one thing that stayed the same…. the catchiness of the name.

That’s why I’m going to be moving this blog to a new location…. like…. soonish.

Thanks, Loki.

Snark and Circumstance will be a namesake for something bigger, something I’m going to have a hand in building. I was approached by an old friend of mine– one far more successful in the writing world after college. Details aside, primarily because they haven’t been hashed out yet, we’re going to take this catchy name and do something bigger with it.

Sure, my biting sarcasm will be a contributing factor– but you know what? I finally get to do something with what I love– as opposed to sporadic instances of text vomit.

People, over time, have noticed that although I’m fairly animated– very little affects me beneath the surface. Then again, this shouldn’t be surprising when you take into account the zany shit circus of WTF-moments that tie together the most recent half of my life. What, you want examples?

Let’s see, I attended the funeral of the first girl I ever kissed/dated before I turned 28.

I’ve stared down the barrel of a 9mm, and had someone threaten to shoot me. By the way, those were on entirely separate occasions (process that one for a minute).

Oh, there’s also the time I was a fucking groomsman in my ex-girlfriend’s wedding party.

There was that bleary morning where I had the national head of TKE, in New Orleans the week before Katrina hit, introduce me by name to his mother as “the guy with freon in his veins”– you know, after having had a beer with Mick Foley not 10 hours earlier.

I could tell the tale of the time I repo-ed a laptop in the middle of a public library.

There was the 4 months I spent coming to terms with a misdiagnosis of Lupus.

How about when I had to slip the lock at work because my dumb ass accidentally locked my keys in the office– which technically means I solo B&E’d a federal facility.

I should also mention that I have had the unsettling experience of calling someone a child-toucher while playing beer pong– only to find out that I was right about five years later.

Then again, these are only a few things that I can mention in public. Is it any wonder why my lack of fucks to give was foretold in tapestry and lore?

It just never stops being funny.

Well I have yet another one to dump into the mix… because on the 5th of November, I swore off a 302 and helped have someone involuntarily sent to in-patient psychiatric care. That’s right, we had one of our friends committed. There’s another one I never though I’d add to the mix, and believe you me– it’s a lot less entertaining than the aforementioned examples of fuck and circumstance.

Did I want to drive an hour after working all day to meet up with two other mutual friends just to do the paperwork to summon the ethereal men with white jackets? Fuck no, I’d rather slam my dick in a car door. Did I want to feel like I’d violated my personal standards of conduct? Please, I’d rather that cock-jacking car speed off first. Seriously, I’m loyal to a fault– and I despise deception and duplicity.

Yet… I had to emulate those very characteristics while talking to this friend frequently for almost three full days. Such bastardly levels of subterfuge and misdirection are probably a bad sign for me, but I’m going to justify it because all signs pointed towards a life-or-death situation. That said, I can’t help but appreciate the irony of the situation.

We all assumed that I’D be the one to end up hugging myself.

At least today my phone wasn’t incessantly ringing while at work. Seriously, all day yesterday, I was cringing at the caller ID. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to partially hide behind a “no cell phone” policy. I also don’t think I’ve ever been so unnerved by the sound of my own ringtone.

Oh well, back to finishing off that mortgage paperwork.
Come to think of it, the brain-melting fuckery of buying a house just might land me in that canvas embrace after all.

Nothing like laying down for what should be six hours worth of sleep and waking up halfway through awake as if I’d been main-lining espresso. I woke up out of a dead sleep (something I’m unaccustomed to in the first place) in full overdrive, and if it weren’t for the fact that the medieval front door to this apartment squeaks like a banshee dragging nails on a chalkboard that also screams, I’d have gone for a very enthusiastic wander through Rome. Oh yeah, it’s like 3am here.

Must be lonely.

Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Anyway. I’m stuck at an impasse, and I’m not happy about it. I can’t reconcile the way that I love damn near everything about Rome– and soon I have to return to the ever blase southwestern New York/northeast Pennsylvania. This city is vibrant, alive, and still very rooted in its rich history. My neck of the woods? I’m lucky if I find people that can tell the difference between you’re/your. This is a level of infatuation that I’ve never felt for a locale, and I’ve been wrestling with the desire to move here.

Seriously! How could I not?!

Then it hit me– besides the money (which my great grandparents didn’t have when they all decided to up and head for the US in the first place), the only reasons I am not making preparations now are my friends and family. Yeah, sure, it’s the Digital Age and I can Skype them for free– I get it– and a 6 hour time difference really isn’t that big a deal. However, it’s the distance that is. For 34 years, I think the farthest I’ve lived from the people that I know and love has been 3 hours… and even then, I had a couple people I knew even if I didn’t hang out with them.

That’s one Hell of a habit to break. Gone would be the family holidays that I’ve looked forward to with a mixed bag of anticipation and anxiety. Gone would be the trainwreck homecomings with the boys. Gone would be the ability to jump in the car and go hang out. Sure, that’s superfluous on many levels– but also gone would be the ability to be there for weddings/funerals/emergencies.

Am I happy with how things are in the States? Nope. Hell, I’m working on buying a house (which is a headache that’s 10x worse than planning a wedding), so it’s not like I’m up shit creek without a paddle either.

That awful moment when you’ve reached an impasse between what you want and what you have.

Now here’s the “but wait, there’s more” moment– to reconcile this euphoric sense of belonging that have had since I got here (in spite of being sick as a fucking dog the first 3 days) and my “issues” with leaving my family/friends behind, I’d need something that everyone needs… a fat stack of cash. When I say a fat stack of cash, I’m talking stupid money. I’m talking the kind of cash that if you don’t have it by the time you’re in you’re 20’s, you’re statistically never going to get it.

Yup. Insomnia sucks, especially when that never-say-die side of you (overdeveloped, in my case) is still trying to figure out a way to make Rome my home.

Oh well, may as well do something with the time on my hands instead of pondering an effective impossibility.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do, right? Well I worked on a road construction crew for four summers during college (so I’m no stranger to professionally playing in traffic), and these people are fucking nuts. Traffic patterns here are not unlike the bastard child of a Zerg rush and Lemmings, and pedestrians give positively zero fucks about the trusty dead-weight-tonnage-rule… chaos and balls are the name and spirit of the game if you wanna get anywhere.

I could get used to it here. Actually, who do I think I’m kidding? A living, breathing city that is deeply in touch with thousands of years of heritage is the perfect place to live. The food, the architecture, the art, the culture, the everything is the reason I could totally expat here and get used to it…. but the madness associated with driving? Screw that noise, I’d rather navigate the winding alleys and blocks on foot.

Oh yeah, and everyone drives micromachines. To the point where riding a scooter isn’t something you’d ever be made fun of for riding.

That’s right, the name of the game here is go. If you were there first, you have the right of way, and other people stop for you. Traffic signals are a nice suggestion, but ultimately feckless. Oddly enough, everyone seems pretty calm and accepting of what would otherwise be a road-rager’s worst-case scenario. It might also have to do with the fact that the only places you can do better than 10 mph are on the main thoroughfares– and those are clusterfucks of Biblical proportion.

Speaking of Biblical– we spent most of the day today at the Vatican Museum… or Musei Vaticani as the locals call it. I’ve seen pictures of St. Peter’s Basilica, and many of the works of art in the museum proper… I’ve seen pictures of the Sistine Chapel… In no way did I once feel like this was going to be like a Lucy/Desi rerun– just on a bigger screen. In fact, I was pretty much awestruck by the whole thing, finally seeing with my own eyes the works of masters like Michelangelo and Raphael.

Or how about Raphael throwing Dante Alighieri into one of the Vatican murals. Dude’s wearing red, and rocking some serious olive branch action.

I would write more….

… but I’ve got a ticket to an audience with Il Papa Francesco in the morning. Not to mention, I’d have to somehow cover the territory spanning the 500 pictures I took today alone. The Italian word of the day today, children, is andiamo— GO!

Me and my big goddamn mouth. Cortana was sick as Hell last week so I quarantined myself to the couch to prevent getting whatever bastard plague that’s getting passed around her office like a bad case of crabs at Caligula’s place. No such luck, I’m afraid, because once we hit the highway for our departing flight in Toronto– I started to sniffle. I told myself, sure, my immune system is going to go full-on Duke Nukem on this thing because I will it so.

Then we got on a nine hour flight… that felt like it was being piloted by the Marquis De Sade. Apparently I’m one of those people whose illnesses decide to do a fat Sheenpile of blow the second they hit 40,000 feet. I tried to sleep, and yeah, that was as futile as resisting the Borg (when they first came out and actually were damn near unstoppable).

My immune system can kiss my ass. My darling wife claims to have licked my keyboard the day I went into quarantine, so there’s that not-serious-but-still-happening blame game. However, 9 hours of sniffling agony later where the only part of me that didn’t hurt was the tip of my elbow (a la Indiana Jones), I was treated to this:

Anyone wanna venture what mountains these are?

Now, I don’t coddle the weak– and that most assuredly includes myself– so I informed my family that I wanted all the drugs. I wasn’t going to deal with some pansy-ass plague while I’m in Rome. Fuck that shit right in the face. So I doped up and shrugged 85% of that shit off like a boss. The other 15% was due to a combination of adrenaline, sudoephedrine, ibuprofen, afrin, and no fucks given. I’ve already snapped over 200 pictures (been here roughly 5 functional hours), and I’ve come to notice something–

I may have known about this trip since, oh, 2013ish– but when you stop at AAA to pick up your Euros, shit gets real. When you make the phone calls to make sure your plastic will work on a different continent, it starts to really set in. Holy shit. I’m going to Rome.

The look on his face! That’s the “aw fuck!” look!

That’s right, I’m actually going to set foot on another goddamn continent for the first time. Let me relish this; don’t judge me because this shit’s business as usual for you. Yeah, I’ve been on a plane before– but this? I guess I’ve suppressed nearly a year’s worth of excitement, and I finally had it set in yesterday after leaving the office. Now it’s here. It’s real. I’m officially on vacation. I suddenly have a lot of excitement.

I’m not talking “I’m gonna go party with the old guard” excitement.
I’m not talking “Holy shit, I’m going to graduate college!” excitement. (Some of you really get that one.)
I’m not talking “CANOE TRIP!” excitement.
I’m not talking “dick in a box” excitement.
I’m not talking “I got published” excitement.
I’m not even talking “I’m getting married” excitement. (Guys, take note of what I just did there.)

This is a level that hasn’t hit me in… I don’t know, too long if not ever. As if a week in Rome wasn’t already a sticky spot in my pants, my parents went ahead and landed us a Papal audience.

No, not that one. The good one.

I don’t give a rat’s ass what your religion is or is not– you can’t tell me that you can’t appreciate the sum of architecture, art, and splendor all around the Vatican. All if which I will record here. That’s right, kids, I’m taking this motherfucker on the road! … or would that be air?